Hoi,
As the "A" word has been mentioned again as is tradition, I want us to talk
instead about how we can advertise / market our strategy, I want us to
discuss how this helps us to reach out. How we can realise the goals that we
so beautifully formulated in our strategy..
To start it off, I have blogged some of my sentiments.
Thanks,
GerardM
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/11/annual-wikipedia-argument-about…
> Fred Bauder
> How many billions in potential advertising revenue do we leave on
> the table each year?
Nobody knows, because the unknown factor in such calculations
is whether Google would continue to bless Wikipedia so heavily if it
started running ads. You cannot assume that the current dominance in
search ranking would be maintained. Google can - and does - tweak
algorithmic factors, which then have profound effects on what types of
sites rank highly.
If you seriously want to make a reasonable estimate, take
a look at the closest similar types of sites which are commercial - e.g.
about.com, answers.com, Weblogs Inc., Mahalo.com, Gawker (sorry!), etc.
That would give a ballpark figure in terms of current Google practice.
Skip the feel-good stuff about the community only being
willing to do free work for an unsullied cause. The veritable
Co-Founder Himself has a $14 million dollar venture-capital backed
endeavor (Wikia) based on the theory that such an idea is false. Are
you calling him and his marquee investors stupid? :-)
In fact, Wikia's relative lack of profitability (it may be
slightly profitable, but it's certainly not a money machine) is a
pretty good indication that such monetization is quite difficult. Even
with all the marketing and public relations advantages that Wikia
gains via a "halo effect" from Wikipedia's prominence, it still
doesn't rake in big bucks.
So slapping a Google Ads box on many pages doesn't print money.
Given the risk that it could actually kill the goose that lays golden
"SERPs", err, eggs, it won't happen.
--
Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php
To avoid further disrupting discussion of interlanguage links and
usability, I'll address the cultural problems separately now. I must
admit, though, that in a discussion where we seemed to have agreed
(rightfully so) that a 1% click rate was significant enough to warrant
serious consideration, I was disappointed that someone could then be so
callous about the need for cultural sensitivity because it most directly
impacts "only 0.55% of the world population" in this case. There is no
meaningful difference in order of magnitude there.
We have significant distortions in the makeup of our community that
affect our culture. There are quite a few groups that are seriously
underrepresented, in part because our culture comes across as unfriendly
to them at best. I talked about African-Americans because it's what was
applicable in that particular situation and I happen to have some
familiarity with the issues. It could just as well have been Australian
Aborigines or another cultural group that has issues with our community.
I'm not as prepared to explain those concerns, but I would welcome
people who can educate us about such problems. It's legitimate to be
wary of things that promote American cultural hegemony, which is another
distortion, but that's not really warranted when the concern relates to
a minority culture in the US.
Some people seem to have gotten hung up on the issue of intent. I didn't
say there was any intent, by the community or individuals, to exclude
certain groups or to create a hostile environment for them. I actually
tried to be as careful as possible not to say that. The point is that
even in the absence of intent, it's possible for our culture to appear
hostile to such groups. We didn't have any intent to be hostile toward
living people, either, yet we've had a long struggle to cope with the
consequences of that impression created by our culture.
Consider the principle of not "biting" newcomers, which relates to a
similar problem. It's not about the intent of the person doing the
"biting", it's about the impact on those who encounter it. We need to be
more welcoming to people, and striving for more cultural awareness is
part of that.
--Michael Snow
In a message dated 11/7/2010 3:19:19 PM Pacific Standard Time,
wikimail(a)inbox.org writes:
> Doesn't Google lets the advertiser pick which searches they want to
> appear on? Is that "manual", or "automagic"? Would letting the
> advertiser pick which articles they want to appear on be "manual", or
> "automagic"?
>
> On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>
> wrote:
> > If automagic worked, I would see ads for stuff I might have at least a
> > passing interest in; I seldom do. But if I'm looking at an article on a
> > book or an author I might well take a look at an ad page linked from it.
> > I buy lots of books. If nothing else it would save a step or two.
>
> With support for location targeting you could do even better. There
> are physicians who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on
> location targeted Google adwords, and they do so because the revenue
> they're generating from it is more than the cost.
>
> I think this is all pretty much a nonstarter, though. Between the
> lack of support for ads in the community and the difficult hurdles
> that would need to be navigated to not get in trouble with the IRS, I
> don't see ads ever coming to Wikimedia Foundation websites.
>
When an advertiser picks which searches they want to appear on, this is
handled by the customer. No time commitment from Google employees there. And
this affects searches, not individual hand-picked end-user pages.
Similarly, webcontent creators using Adsense, can block certain types of ads, or even
certain advertisers, but again, this is done by the customer, so-to-speak,
not by a Google-paid employee.
If there were a system created, where all the *effort* were off loaded to
the payer, not the pay...ed, then you'd gain that financial benefit.
The creation of such a system however, involves the effort of a much higher
level of paid employee :)
So there you go. No free lunch.
In a message dated 11/7/2010 8:12:40 AM Pacific Standard Time,
thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com writes:
> They won't be people that want ads, though. They'll be people that
> want ad revenue for us. If they click, they'll be clicking to get us
> revenue and not actually buying, which advertisers stopped falling for
> years ago.
>
>
I'm also skeptical that any sort of tab that is just a click here to see
ads will be very productive. I'm also skeptical that manually placed and
manually monitored, internet advertising even pays for the wages of the worker.
This is why Google uses automagic. And why everyone else does as well.
W
In a message dated 11/7/2010 2:03:27 PM Pacific Standard Time,
jayvdb(a)gmail.com writes:
> > I'm also skeptical that any sort of tab that is just a click here to
> see
> > ads will be very productive. I'm also skeptical that manually placed
> and
> > manually monitored, internet advertising even pays for the wages of the
> worker.
> >
> > This is why Google uses automagic. And why everyone else does as well.
>
> Not everyone. There are still many websites that only have a few
> sponsors.
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
The number of sponsors is not related to the question of whether they are
manually placing and monitoring ads on a page by page basis.
Sites with few sponsors can also be rotating ads through automagic, so it's
not a question of the number of sponsors.
My counter point was that the issue of placing relevant ads manually, is
financial suicide, as the income from individual ads is minimal. My point
being, that the income from individual ads placed, is far less than the wages
paid to the human ad placer and monitor.
W